Jeff Christensen VP of Product at Seegrid, the leader in connected self-driving vehicles for materials handling, suggested that manufacturers need to adopt and even embrace the Industry 4.0 technology. “As we advance steadily toward Industry 4.0, companies should prepare to redefine how they approach materials handling, such as ensuring adoption verification,” suggested Christensen.

Christensen added that within the materials handling industry, plant managers are leveraging the data collected by their Industry 4.0 solutions to identify variance and make adjustments to improve their existing processes. By recognizing a consistent problem via data, the manager can understand if there is a global or local issue in a more comprehensive way than visually assessing problem workflows or processes.

Adoption is often the toughest step–companies must ensure employees use the new solution to its full potential. Adoption is often a stumbling block because it requires human change, and human change is hard, slow, and messy. The natural human reaction to change is resistance.

Before real change can happen, employees must be sold on the true value that new technologies can provide. In order to move on to the next step, the technologies must prove they can make significant improvements in efficiency and predictability. At the crux of Step 2 is educating employees and ensuring they are properly equipped to work with the new solutions to deliver optimal results. Management can then analyze the data to ensure the technologies are being utilized to their expectations.

Seegrid (www.seegrid.com) is the leading provider of connected self-driving vehicles for materials handling with hundreds of thousands of miles driven. The Seegrid Smart Platform combines flexible and reliable infrastructure-free vision guided vehicles with fleet management and enterprise intelligence data for a complete connected solution. Seegrid accelerates Industry 4.0 and lean initiatives with incremental automation, helping companies achieve a truly connected enterprise and transform into smart factories of the future. Follow Seegrid on Twitter at @Seegrid.